Take that, GitHub: AWS launches its own AI coding helper

Take that, GitHub: AWS launches its own AI coding helper

Apparently, no industry is immune from Amazon, which will now compete with GitHub with a new AI coding assistant from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new tool, called Amazon CodeWhisperer, provides developers with machine learning-based suggestions aimed at increasing productivity.

The new tool supports code written in Python, Java, and JavaScript, as well as integrated development environments (IDEs) such as VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and AWS Cloud9.

How does it work?

Amazon says that CodeWhisperer will continually review your code and comments and present you with syntactically correct recommendations. The tech giant says the recommendations are synthesized based on your coding style and variable names and are "not just snippets."

Apparently, CodeWhisperer uses various contextual cues to generate recommendations, including the location of the cursor in the source code, the code that precedes the cursor, comments, and code in other files in the same projects.

Amazon says the tool was trained "on billions of lines of code" pulled from open source repositories, Amazon's internal repositories, API documentation, and forums.

Users are free to use the recommendations as is, or they can enhance and customize them to meet their needs.

Support for the AWS Lambda console is not currently on the menu, but should be available "very soon," according to Amazon.

While this is likely good news for developers, GitHub is unlikely to be celebrating. The popular coding platform has just announced that its own AI-powered coding assistant, Copilot, has entered general availability.

Developers may need all the help they can get to stay sane. A DigitalOcean report found that almost half (42%) are considering quitting their jobs or have already done so this year, citing issues such as a lack of time and resources to work on projects.